Not a word from coastal towns as toll tops 1200
JAKARTA: Rescuers were yesterday digging through debris with their bare hands and anxious family members struggled to contact loved ones who remained unaccounted for as the death toll from an earthquake and tsunami in eastern Indonesia appeared to be headed well past 1200.
A string of towns along the western coast of the island of Sulawesi remained cut off by washedout roads and downed communication lines, leaving the extent of the damage and loss of life there unknown more than 48 hours after the magnitude 7.5 quake struck.
With much of the quake zone inaccessible, the relief effort has focused on Palu, a town of 380,000, where crumpled buildings and bridges were surrounded by bodies, some covered by blankets, others with their clothes ripped by the force of a tsunami that measured as high as 6m.
In Palu alone, the death toll was at least 1193, according to volunteers who compiled figures from local hospitals.
The latest official national total was 832, but that was on Sunday and nearly all those deaths were in Palu. Indonesia’s national disaster agency warned that the count could reach far higher once relief workers reached major towns such as Donggala, which has a population of about 300,000 and is normally a halfhour drive north of Palu.
‘‘The death toll will increase but I cannot say [by] how much,’’ Sutopo Nugroho, the disaster agency spokesman, said in Jakarta.
The Government was expected to release a new total late last night.
With ‘‘catastrophic damage’’ in many areas, relief agencies were bracing for a large loss of life once teams could assess the effects in Donggala and other towns, said Tom Howells, programme implementation director for Save the Children’s Jakarta office.
‘‘Aid agencies and local authorities are struggling to reach several communities around Donggala . . . We hold grave fears for many of the towns in this area,’’ Howells said.
An Associated Press reporter in Palu said that rescue workers were focusing on an eightstorey hotel where on Saturday voices were heard calling for help from under the rubble. Officials estimated about 50 people were inside the
hotel, but the cries for help were no longer heard by Sunday afternoon, the news agency reported.
Aerial images showed a landmark mosque inundated with water, houses that had tumbled down muddy hillsides and a ship swept ashore in Palu by the force of the waves.
Hundreds of bodies stuffed into yellow, black and blue body bags were piled in a hospital courtyard as relatives
began the grim task of identifying loved ones.
To avoid the spread of diseases such as cholera and typhoid, disaster management officials said they would begin mass burials on Sunday, taking fingerprints and other information so that the dead could be identified at a later date.
Dozens of strong aftershocks have struck Palu, where fearful residents were sleeping in the streets and reluctant to reenter their homes, said Rafiq Anshori, head of the Indonesian Red Cross’ disaster preparedness division. — TCA
❛ We hold grave fears for many of the towns in this
area